And now there was something he must say—the time had come—something the kindness of which he did not question, could not question, but the seeming-kindness of which he doubted. How would it seem to her? Even—how would she take it—she, he remembered it now with a sudden sickness, who even in honeymoon’s sans souci and complacent time had desired and bought visiting cards engraved “Mrs. K. L. Senn?”
He had meant to suggest it before they left Hongkong—but occasions had slipped, or been crowded out. And, too, in Hongkong, he had assumed that she took, as he did, its advisability and convenience for granted. But he realized now that Ruby had not. And in Hongkong he himself had not realized it as the necessity he saw it now.
She had been scrupulously tended and served as they journeyed, but small danger signals had pricked his quick and subtle intelligence, as broken twigs and twisted vines or scattered grain, a feather caught on a thorn, a bead dropped by a cactus, are messages of warning to a Sioux. He had seen a look that was scarcely a look—more a veneered masking crust than a look—on coolie faces and the faces of pilgrims they’d met and passed—nothing much—and yet—he kept his pistol well loaded and lay at night across the curtain-door of her tent, and his thoughts busied his mind as the silk-wrapped shuttle busies the rapid loom.
In London she’d said to him: “Make me a Chinese woman!” She had meant it. Would she say it now? Could she mean it now? He thought not.
She had liked Hongkong—in spite of its social coldness—as a child likes a ribbon-tied box of sweetmeats, and had nibbled at it much as the child nibbles and likes its chocolates and nougats. But she had not warmed to the realer China as they had passed through it. She had exclaimed at its picture and beauty, laughed at its “quaintness,” but he sensed that it had not touched her, and that not once had she prostrated herself before it. This soul-pilgrimage of his was a picnic to her: gaily colored, well-provisioned, inimitably stage-managed—a delightful kaleidoscopic interlude.
Few tricks of custom, manner or words had crept in to her use during her Washington years, and no traits of personality or thought. But the American vocabulary is too apposite, it catches too neatly and firmly, not to have irresistible appeal to all word-quick ears, and no English girl—princess or housemaid—could listen as often and as long as Ivy Gilbert had to voluble Lucille Smiths and Mary Withrows without adopting a syllable or so of a fresh young vernacular so limpid and forceful that it needs no dictionary and grows a classic.
A hillside homestead, a small husbandman’s that clung like a rosy fungus on the mountainous steepness, morning-glories and long columbine ropes matting the overtopping lemon-trees that flanked and perfumed it, had lumped King-lo’s throat and quivered his lips as they came into sight of it; Ruby had clapped her hands at it when she saw it, and called it “cute.”
A bird on a cypress-tree twittered some sudden domestic anxiety to her absent mate, and Sên King-lo turned to his wife and said in a slow, quiet voice: “Ruby, I am sure that it would make our going through these untraveled places easier and more simple if we wore what Chinese gentlefolk wear—clothes not unlike all those that the Chinese who meet us ever have seen. And it would be a kindness to the old, untraveled grandmother who is waiting for us in Ho-nan. Would you mind? Would you mind too much, dearest?”
His wife turned clear laughing eyes to his anxious eyes.
“I’d love it,” she told him.